[KevinH]

Hi All,

As user-none said in his post we have been working on getting some fixes into Sigil and adding support for python 2.7 plugins, Lua plugins, and planned support for Python 3 (hopefully soon) plugins.

This alpha release also includes fixes for saving selected html entities, changes in Code View editing to replace strike tags (now deprecated) with del tags, and a bug fix to properly identify svg image tags as inline, single style tags.

As user-none said, we are looking for feedback and ideas on the plugin system we have added to Sigil.

To help plugin authors get started adding their own input, output, and edit plugins, we have thrown together some brief documentation on how the plugin system works (and I am a horrible ebook editor so improvements to the documentation are welcomed!), and created a simple testme.zip plugin that demonstrates many features of the edit plugin interface.

I have attached the documentation and the testme.zip plugin to this post.

(Please note, plugins for Sigil are zip archives and so to add the testme.zip plugin to Sigil, do not unzip it first.)

The key difference with Sigil plugins is that Sigil can use any Python 2.7 interpreter already on your computer. Most Linux and Mac OS X Mavericks users will already have Python 2.7 installed. For Windows users we recommended ActiveState's Active Python 2.7.X Community edition which can be downloaded for free and easily installed.

So we are looking for volunteers to download this new alpha release and try playing around with the Python 2.7 plugins and provide feedback so that we can refine and improve the support for Plugins in Sigil.

Hopefully, DiapDealer will post his experimental port of the KindleUnpack plugin to Sigil in this issue for you to play with as well. With his Sigil plugin, you can import .mobi ebooks directly into Sigil for editing. A future plugin already planned is to add output plugin that passes its contents directly to kindlegen for creating mobis as well.

If anyone has any questions about how to use or write your own Sigil python plugin, I would be happy to provide what help I can.

Please let us know what you think about Sigil's new plugin system and how it can be improved.

Once plugins are in place, future plans for Sigil include adding as much epub 3.0 support as we can given the currently available support in WebKit that is part of Qt 5.3.1. This will come in small steps after we have plugin support fully implemented and released

Thanks,

KevinH